Milestones Apr. 1, 1996

  • Share
  • Read Later

CONVICTED. LYLE MENENDEZ, 28, and his brother ERIK, 25; of first-degree murder in the 1989 shotgun killings of parents Jose and Kitty; in Los Angeles. The first time, the brothers were tried in simultaneous courtroom proceedings with separate juries. Deliberations were deadlocked, and a mistrial was declared. This time, a single jury accepted the prosecution's argument that the pair executed their mother and father in order to tap into the family fortune, rejecting the defense's contention that the killings were a response to abuse.

SENTENCED. JOHN SALVI, 24; to life imprisonment without parole for the first-degree murder of two receptionists at a pair of Boston-area abortion clinics; in Dedham, Massachusetts.

RECOVERING. TOM BRADLEY, 78, mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993; from a heart attack; in L.A.

AILING. TAMMY FAYE MESSNER, 54, former wife of televangelist Jim Bakker; with colon cancer. Her current husband, Roe Messner, sentenced to prison last week for bankruptcy fraud, has prostate cancer.

DIED. WALTER SULLIVAN, 78, science journalist; in Riverside, Connecticut. Sullivan made the esoteric less so in such books as the Antarctic-themed Quest for a Continent and We Are Not Alone, an account of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

DIED. RENE CLEMENT, 82, film director; in southern France. Clement's fascination with World War II informed works as diverse as Forbidden Games (1951), the Oscar-winning portrait of an orphan who learns to mourn her parents by burying her pets, and Is Paris Burning? (1966), an epic of the closing days of the Nazi occupation.

DIED. ODYSSEUS ELYTIS, 84, Greek poet and 1979 Nobel laureate best known for The Axion Esti (Worthy It Is, 1959), an epic that wedded a modern sensibility to Greek history; in Athens.